Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(97)

“Your scars have healed,” Kieran said, touching one of his light, slender fingers to a torn place in Mark’s shirt where the skin showed through.

“But they are still ugly,” Mark said. He was waiting for the first stars to come out, so he could name his family on them. He didn’t see Kieran draw closer until the other boy was opposite him, his face elegantly shadowed in the twilight.

“Nothing about you is ugly,” Kieran said. He leaned in to kiss Mark and Mark, after a moment of surprise, turned his face up and met Kieran’s lips with his.

It was the first time he had ever been kissed, and he had never thought it would be by a boy, but he was glad it was Kieran. He had never expected a kiss to be so agonizing and pleasurable at the same time. He had wanted to touch Kieran’s hair for months, and now he did, burying his fingers in the strands, which were turning from black to blue edged with gold. They felt like licks of flame against his skin.

They curled up under the blanket together that night, but they got little sleep, and Mark forgot to number the names of his family on the stars—for that night and most nights after. Soon Mark grew used to waking with his arm thrown over Kieran’s body or his hand tangled in blue-white curls.

He learned that kisses and touches and professions of love could make you forget, and that the more he was with Kieran, the more he wanted to be with him and not with anyone else. He lived for the time they were alone together, usually at night, whispering so no one could overhear them. “Tell me of the Unseelie Court,” Mark would say, and Kieran would murmur tales of the dark Court and the pale King, his father, who ruled over it. And “Tell me of the Nephilim,” Kieran would say, and Mark would speak of the Angel, and of the Dark War and what had happened to him, and of his brothers and sisters.

“You don’t hate me?” Mark said, lying in Kieran’s arms, somewhere in a high Alpine meadow. His unkempt blond hair brushed against Kieran’s shoulder as he turned his head. “For being Nephilim? The others do.”

“You need not be Nephilim anymore. You could choose to be of the Wild Hunt. Embrace your faerie nature.”

Mark shook his head. “When they beat me for saying I was a Shadowhunter, it only made me more sure. I know what I am even if I cannot say it.”

“You can say it only to me,” said Kieran, his long fingers ghosting across Mark’s cheek. “Here in this space between us. It is safe.”

So Mark pressed up against his lover and only friend and whispered into the space between them, where his cold body pressed against Kieran’s warm one. “I am a Shadowhunter. I am a Shadowhunter. I am a Shadowhunter.”

Emma stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom, slowly peeling off her tank top.

Twenty minutes with a bottle of bleach had removed the blood from the inside of the Toyota. That had been fine. She was used to bloodstains. But there was something more visceral about this, about Julian’s blood dried on her skin, red-brown patches over her ribs and shoulder. As she unzipped her jeans and wriggled out of them, she could see splatters of dried blood along the waistband, the telltale pinpricks of it up and down the seams.

She balled up the jeans and top and threw them in the trash.

In the shower, the water scalding hot, she scrubbed away the blood and dirt and sweat. She watched the water run pinkish down the drain. She couldn’t count how many times that had happened, how often she’d made herself bleed during training and battles. Scars slashed across her midriff and shoulders, along her arms, at the backs of her knees.

But Julian’s blood was different.

When she saw it she thought of him, shot and crumpling, the way his blood had run like water through her fingers. It was the first time in years that she’d actually thought he might die, that she might lose him. She knew what people said about parabatai, knew that it was meant to be a loss as profound as that of a spouse or a sibling. Emma had lost her parents; she had thought she knew what loss was, was prepared for it.

But nothing had prepared her for the feeling that the idea of losing Jules wrenched out of her: that the sky would go dark forever, that there would never be solid ground again. Even stranger had been the feeling that had rushed through her when she realized he was going to be all right. She had become aware of his physical presence in a way that almost hurt. She had wanted to put her arms around him, to grab on to him with her fingers digging in as if she could press them together hard enough to seal their skin, interlock their bones. She knew it didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t explain it another way.

She just knew it was intense, and painful, and a thing she hadn’t felt about Julian before. And that it scared her.

The water had gone cold. She spun the shower off with a savage twist of her wrist, stepped out, and toweled her hair dry. She found a clean camisole and boxer shorts folded on her laundry basket and, dressed, stepped out into her bedroom.

Cristina was sitting on her bed.

“Whoa,” Emma said. “I didn’t know you were in here! I could have come out of the bathroom stark naked or something.”

“I doubt you have anything I don’t have.” Cristina looked distracted; her dark hair was down in braids, and she was interweaving her fingers the way she did when she was preoccupied.

“Is everything all right?” Emma asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “You look—bothered.”